Question

Why did Malcolm Little change his name to Malcolm X?

Answer 1

He joined the Nation of Islam.

Answer 2

Answer:

The correct answer is A. Malcolm Little changed his name to Malcolm X because he joined the Nation of Islam.

Explanation:

Malcolm X, born Malcolm Little, was a revolutionary leader of the African American minority. He was the son of a Protestant pastor and a mulatto woman, born of the violation of a black woman by a white man; during his childhood he suffered the continuous transfers of residence of his family, fleeing the aggressions of racist groups, which culminated in the murder of his father in 1931.

In 1942 he settled in New York and became a street criminal (drug dealer, pimp, thief). Sentenced to seven years in jail in 1946, he abandoned his drug addiction, studied by correspondence and made contact with the Nation of Islam, a Muslim religious movement led by Elijah Muhammad, who considered blacks the favorite people of Allah and Whites the personification of the devil.

He went then from the crime and the marginality to which the circumstances condemned him to an effective political activism in defense of a battered racial minority. Upon leaving prison in 1952, he joined the Nation of Islam and changed his last name to the "X", which symbolized the original African last name that American blacks had lost.